2018-03-05

#TESSninja, day 1

Today was the first day of Preparing for TESS, organized by Dan Foreman-Mackey (Flatiron) and others. It is organized like the #GaiaSprint in that it is a hack week, starting with pitches and dedicated to getting stuff done. The crew pitched some great ideas on day one and then hacked. I am trying to work on algorithmic approaches to efficient radial-velocity follow-up.

Melissa Ness (Columbia) and Megan Bedell (Flatiron) started an interesting project to follow up anomalous stars in an open cluster: Do the stars with element-abundance anomalies also show anomalies in the time domain or in asteroseismology? Many other projects are working towards obtaining cleaned or calibrated light curves, although my heart sang when various people (notably Rodrigo Luger at UW) pointed out that we don't want to de-trend, we want to have a model that explains every light curve as a combination of spacecraft and stellar variability (and planets).